by Nalini Singh
It glowed from within, a beacon through the falling strokes of white.
Landing outside the glass structure, he saw her silhouette within, his dangerous warrior mate who was so gentle with the plants she nurtured. When he walked in, he brought with him a breath of winter air, but it was soon overwhelmed by the warmth that held sway here.
“Archangel.” There was a tightness around her eyes as his consort walked, tall and strong, toward him. She’d taken off her jacket and her larger weapons as well as her forearm sheaths but was otherwise dressed as she’d been earlier, her garments sleek and black. Sliding one hand around the back of his neck, her other on his chest, she kissed him in welcome, her warm lips thawing his cold ones and her fingers on his face a caress. “Am I glad to see you.”
Raphael curved his wings around her. “Any other incursions into your mind?”
A shake of her head. “Not after the owl on the vanity flew through the balcony doors.” She paused before adding, “I keep telling myself there was nothing scary or threatening about the experience—the owls were astonishingly beautiful, and I actually felt privileged to have seen them.” The rim of silver around her eyes glittered. “And aside from the whole predicting-my-death thing, the voice hasn’t harmed me.”
“Do not joke about your death.” He cupped the side of her face, felt the life of her burn him with its fire. “I have spoken to the Legion.” The last time the birds had begun to act strangely, the voices had been in Raphael’s head; it had turned out the birds had been acting as the Legion’s eyes and ears.
“I don’t suppose they sent the owls?”
“No.” The Primary says they remember white owls with golden eyes from long ago, but they do not know why they remember.
Elena ran her fingers through his hair, dusting off stubborn particles of snow. “No point wasting our time obsessing about it.” Words that held a resolute decisiveness. “We’ll find out when the Cascade is ready to let us know.”
I do not do well with such a lack of control, hbeebti. Especially when it involved her. His hunter whose mortal heart had permanently altered his own and in so doing, saved him from an eternity of numbness and ice.
She patted his chest. “We all have crosses to bear. My most annoying one right now isn’t the voice that waxes rhapsodical about owls, but this.” She pointed to the wing she continued to hold stiffly. “Nisia says it’s a toddler’s injury.” A sulky look to her that would’ve made him smile at any other time. “She did what healers do, but she couldn’t repair the entire tear.”
Raphael ran his hand down the wing, sending healing energy into her before she could stop him. That energy was more potent than anything possessed by even angelkind’s most senior healer, but it remained stuck at a frustratingly low level in terms of capacity. Raphael’s body only ever contained a trivial amount, and once utilized, it took time to rebuild it.
But it was enough to further Nisia’s work and ease his consort’s pain.
She sighed, moving her wing more naturally after he was done. “Next time I get all noble and turn down your ability to heal”—she pointed a finger at him—“ignore me and do that.”
“Next time you will not have a chance to argue with me. I will do what must be done to care for my consort.”
“Come, Your Archangelness.” Laughter in the curve of her lips as she teased him, a fading of the lines around her eyes. “Montgomery brought me more goodies to feed my bottomless pit of a stomach.” Scrunching up her nose at the demands her body placed on her as it grew deeper into immortality, she said, “I haven’t got any alcohol out here, so I’ll fix you a coffee and you can tell me about what’s happening at the sinkhole.”
“As in the old movie we saw where the wife waits for her husband with a hot meal and perfectly groomed hair?”
“Don’t forget the pink frilly apron,” said the woman whose hair was escaping her braid in curling tendrils around a face that bore a smudge of dirt—and whose body generally bristled with knives.
Far more at home with such a welcome, Raphael ran his hand down the glory of her wing as she moved to the part of her workbench that held the trays of food and drink. “We’ve finished erecting the fence around the sinkhole.” Raphael had assisted in shifting the necessary building materials—an archangel could fly with considerably more than the strongest angel.
The construction itself had been done by a mix of human and vampiric firms. The line between mortals and vampires and angels remained, must remain, but Raphael’s city functioned a great deal more cohesively than most. The battle with Lijuan followed by the rebuilding process had forged certain ties of loyalty and cooperation.
“You built in the windows I suggested?”
“Do not worry, Elena, your curious cats will not pay a fatal price.” Smash-proof, the viewing panels had been placed at a number of points around the fence. “Angelic guards will prevent others from overflying the lava.” While the furious burst of unknown energy had pushed Elena out of danger, that could’ve been nothing but luck.
And the idea of her life hanging on such a slim thread was enough to freeze Raphael’s breath in his lungs. “Honor spoke with a number of scholars who study the earth.” Dmitri’s wife was a scholar of growing renown in her own field of ancient cultures and languages. “All agree there should be no lava at that location and depth. It is not a thing of nature.”
Pouring coffee into a mug, Elena knit her brow. “It sounds suspiciously like how Naasir and Andromeda described finding Alexander.”
“Alexander has a gift for metals. He deliberately created a barrier that would protect his Sleeping body.”
After passing him the coffee, Elena began to pluck the browned leaves off one of her plants. “Is there a chance we’ve got a Sleeping archangel or Ancient below your territory?”
“If an Ancient chose to Sleep in this place before it became mine, I would have no way of knowing.” Even the most powerful immortals gave off no energy while they Slept, the reason why they could rest without being interrupted.
Putting the potted plant back in its hanging basket, Elena moved on to the next one on her bench. “It’d be bad, wouldn’t it?” She met him with those eyes of penetrating gray that had become more and more true silver as her immortality advanced. “If another archangel woke up.”
“It would fracture the fragile balance of the world.” Lijuan’s disappearance had alleviated the rising pressure that had resulted from eleven archangels being awake at once. The Cadre of Ten had run at a lower number at times during angelic history, but never at a higher one. The world was not big enough to separate out that many devastating powers.
“If another archangel does wake,” he said, “we cannot guarantee that their demands will be like my mother’s.” Caliane hadn’t insisted on a large territory upon waking, content with a small part of Japan. Alexander, by contrast, had wanted all his former territory.
“Just having that many archangels awake . . .”
“Yes.” Too many archangels too close together led inevitably to war and death and destruction. Even Raphael’s parents had not been able to stay together always. Love, deep and perhaps a touch mad, had softened the edges of Caliane’s and Nadiel’s power against each other, but it hadn’t erased it.
“Catch.” Elena threw him a flower that had gone a spotted brown, its petals crumpled inward.
Plucking it out of the air, he closed his hand around it. When he opened it again, on his palm lay a blush-pink rose with edges of gold.
Elena’s smile made him feel a proud youth who had pleased his equally young lover. “I can’t get over how you do that.” Taking the bloom from his hand, she brought it to her nose and breathed deep, her eyelashes lowering, luxuriant fans far darker than her hair. Then, the scent in her lungs, she tucked the rose behind her ear.
“It is a parlor trick.” Raphael flexed his hand. “I’d be more pleased i
f my ability to heal had not stagnated since the previous Cascade surge. At times it seems as if it is becoming less potent.”
“What about the other archangels?” Elena bit off part of a homemade energy bar, and he thought her wrist looked too thin. “Do you know if any of them have developed stronger powers over the course of this pause?”
“As far as Jason has been able to confirm, the entire Cadre is stuck in time when it comes to our Cascade-born abilities.” His spymaster had a way of discovering secrets even about the apex predators of the world. “However, Favashi continues to concern.”
Elena carefully showered a newly planted seedling with water, her movements as strong as ever even if she’d lost weight under the force of an incredible and ongoing biological change. “She being difficult again?”
Raphael considered his recent interactions with the Archangel of China—and it felt novel yet to refer to Favashi as that, China a place that was so utterly Lijuan’s. “It’s gone beyond difficult at this point.”
“Delusions of grandeur because she got to take over such a massive territory?” Elena suggested. “Might be enough to go to a ‘new’ archangel’s head—she’s the newest member of the Cadre, right?”
“Yes.” Favashi had only been an archangel for a hundred years in comparison to Raphael’s five hundred, though their ages were not so distant in immortal terms. But his history was unlike that of any other member of the Cadre—the beloved and treasured child of two archangels, one of them an Ancient, his ascension had been written before he was born, his progress tracked by angels all across the world. Still, they had been startled and shocked when the sky shattered to rain gemstone blue when he was a bare thousand years of age.
“I worry your Bluebell will beat my record.”
Elena’s eyes were solemn when they met his. “He’s too young, isn’t he?”
“I barely survived my ascension and I was double his age.”
Swallowing hard, Elena said, “Has an ascension ever failed, an angel unable to handle the storm of archangelic power?”
“Yes.” A hard truth angelkind preferred to forget. “It isn’t simply a case of raw strength, either. Illium doesn’t have the life experience to handle the politics and power plays that come with being one of the Cadre—his heart is . . . vulnerable to bruising in a way it cannot be if he is to survive.”
Of all Raphael’s Seven, it was Illium who was the most human at heart. Raphael would do everything in his power to assist him should the blue-winged angel indeed ascend, but he couldn’t stuff hundreds of years of experience into Illium’s head . . . and he couldn’t protect Illium the archangel as he had once protected Illium the wild little boy who liked to follow him around.
Raphael, can I fly with you? I brought an apple to share.
Raphael! Look, I can do air tumbles now!
Raphael, Raphael, Raphael, my wings are growing as big as yours!
“Do you think it’s certain?” Elena’s voice merging with the remembered tones of a little boy who had not yet suffered the three great tragedies that would shape him. “That Illium will become Cadre one day?”
“Nothing is certain. But Illium, too, has an Ancient for a parent.” His father had been not much younger than Caliane. “And the Hummingbird . . . she is an old and rare being.”
After putting down the empty coffee mug, Raphael began to walk around Elena’s greenhouse; he hadn’t gone far when he reached up to touch a trailing vine that had leaves covered in what felt like fur. “As for Favashi, Elijah agrees with your theory about her being drunk on her newfound power.” The Archangel of South America was Raphael’s closest ally in the Cadre—if you didn’t count his mother.
Caliane had left him bloody and broken on a forgotten field far from civilization when he’d yet been a youth and she’d been a creature of madness. She’d come back from her long Sleep changed. Sane. And willing to take on any enemy for Raphael.
He remained uncertain how he felt about that—his mother had a way of seeing in him the child she’d left behind. She could not see that the cold loneliness of that grassy field bejeweled with blood rubies had forever ended the final tattered remnants of his childhood. Despite that, he accepted that her loyalty was limitless.
“Favashi’s always been one of the more human members of the Cadre.” Elena dug her fingers into soil to plant another seedling. “I mean, she’s still very much an archangel and distant with it. You’re the only one of the Cadre who’s been foolish enough to fall in love with a mortal and become a little bit human.”
Her words stirred a memory, of Lijuan telling him he must murder Elena, for she would make him a little bit mortal. At the time, he’d thought it well-meaning but misguided advice. For even then, he could’ve never hurt his hunter. Only later had he come to realize that the millennia-old archangel had understood that Elena could foster in him a power unlike any he’d ever before known.
Their wildfire was a weapon of searing life. Anathema to an archangel like Lijuan, who reveled in death, her power feeding on the life force of others to leave them dried-out husks.
“I am quite content with my choice,” he said, walking to stand behind his consort. She tucked her wings neatly against her back so he could put his hands on the bench on either side of her as he kissed her neck, the silken weight of her wings trapped in between their bodies.
Last night, she’d fallen asleep on his left wing, his right her blanket and his palm on her naked hip. Such intimacies were theirs alone. No one else had the right to touch Elena in such a way. Now, she shivered and turned her head. “Raphael.”
Their kiss was an erotic dance, a languid brush, and a possessive brand. The latter came from both of them, each as bad as the other when it came to claiming their own. Their tongues stroked, played, their bodies both hungry for more and deeply sated at the proximity.
Breaking the kiss on a rough sigh, Elena pressed her lips to his jaw before turning back to her bench. “My hands are filthy,” she said, “or they’d be all over you right now.” She wiggled dirt-covered fingers in his direction.
“I see you’ve been using your gloves again.” Frowning as she laughed, he ran his finger over a cut on her forearm, visible because she’d pushed up the sleeves of her top. “How did you do this?”
“Probably from the edge of a pot. It’ll heal quick enough.” Shrugging off the minor wound, she carried on with her potting. “Thanks to you, I’m no longer in danger of dying because of some weird bacteria that I picked up from the soil.”
Raphael went to heal the cut, but his healing energy had flatlined. Teeth gritted together, he tightened his grip on her bench. Elena was a blooded hunter who’d helped bring a mad and murderous archangel to justice. Wounds were a part of her life—but he didn’t like the look of that cut. It was too raw and deep, as if it had been newly taken; however, she hadn’t done it since his arrival.
Which meant it should’ve begun to heal at the very edges at least. Because while Elena was an infant in immortal terms, she’d already developed better healing abilities than a mortal.
Yet as he watched, she accidentally stretched the wound while reaching for a seedling on the far side of the bench . . . and a fine droplet of blood welled out over the edge.
7
“Elena, we must clean this cut.” Raphael didn’t wait for her to respond, instead tugging her to the tap she’d had installed in one corner of the greenhouse, on the far edge of the as yet unplanted garden she’d filled with rich black soil.
“Do you remember when you might’ve cut it?” he asked as the water washed off the blood, the light pinkness of it soon disappearing into the soil of her garden.
“No.” Elena stared at the small wound. “It looks too fresh.” Scowling on the heels of her words, she shook her head. “We’re probably just being paranoid because of the Cascade restart.” She pulled her sleeve down over it. “Let’s check it a
gain when we go inside.”
Raphael wanted to order a healer to fly here at once, but Elena was correct. It was only a cut. A thing shrugged off by even the smallest mortals day after day.
Elena had returned to her bench, Raphael standing a short distance away, when the door to the greenhouse opened.
Illium’s golden eyes took in the tableau, and he hesitated on the doorstep. Conscious of the turbulence that held the younger angel in thrall, Raphael said, Come, Illium, at the same time that Elena glared. “In, and shut the door, or you’ll let out all the warmth. Then I’d have to murderize you for killing my plants.”
“You break my heart, Ellie.” The silver that edged the blue of Illium’s wings glinted in the light as he walked over to the tray and poured himself half a mug of coffee. There were extra drinking vessels, of course. Montgomery knew far too well that Elena’s greenhouse was a beacon that called to many far and wide.
“I’ve just returned from the sinkhole,” the angel said after throwing back the coffee and putting the mug aside with a sigh of satisfaction. “No change.”
While the report was appropriate and welcome, Raphael knew the real reason Illium had flown here rather than to his home in the Tower. Elena’s Bluebell adored her, and it was to her that he would speak things he wouldn’t speak even to Raphael. And tonight was the one-year anniversary of Aodhan’s return to the Refuge.
The angel who was Illium’s closest friend had asked to be resettled at the Refuge for a short period in the aftermath of his sister’s giving birth. The pregnancy had been a shock to the entire angelic community—angelic births were rare in the extreme, and Aodhan’s sister was young, comparatively speaking. The shock had been magnified when two other angels fell pregnant three months and six months later, respectively.
But after the shock had come a great celebration, the children to come even more cherished in the face of the battle losses resulting from Raphael’s fight against Lijuan, as well as the piercing loss of five angels in the prime of their lives due to Charisemnon’s plague. Angels had fallen from the skies that day, to smash into buildings and onto streets, the horror of the Falling one no immortal would ever forget.